Serious Play
How the World's Best
Companies Simulate to Innovate
"I am ready to
declare Michael Schrage's Serious Play a seminal contribution to the 100-year thread of
modern management thought. In short, I love this book! It is absolutely an original. . . .
And it is absolutely right." Tom Peters
Serious Play is about serious
work: how the world's leading companies model, prototype, and simulate to innovate.
Increasingly, prototypes are the key platforms and models are the core media for managing
risk and creating value. They allow for cost-effective creativity, encourage profitable
improvisation, and inspire organizations to collaborate in unexpected ways. Serious Play
is a crisply written handbook for product, process, and project leaders who are determined
to manage their innovation initiatives successfully.
As digital technologies for
modeling and simulation offer more value for less money, they provoke fundamental
challenges to organizational culture and design. MIT research associate Michael Schrage
asserts that conventional wisdom surrounding innovation gets turned inside out: What
innovative companies choose not to model often proves more important than what they do.
Contrary to the popular assumption that innovative teams generate innovative prototypes,
in fact innovative prototypes generate innovative teams. How innovators play with their
models and simulations invariably matters far more than what they actually plan. In fact,
Schrage shows why innovative firms cannot seriously plan unless they seriously play.
Drawing upon a range of
companies as diverse as Walt Disney, Boeing, Merrill Lynch, General Electric, Sony, IBM,
IDEO, Microsoft, Royal Dutch Shell, DaimlerChrysler, and American Airlines, Schrage
identifies the common patterns and practices that distinguish productive prototyping
cultures from pathological ones. He explores the intimate connection between how leading
innovators model reality and how they actually manage it. He examines prototyping failures
as rigorously as he explains prototyping successes.
The essential message of
Serious Play is that tomorrow's innovations will increasingly be the byproduct of how
companies and their customers behave and misbehave-around this new generation of models,
prototypes, and simulations. The distinction between serious play and serious work
dissolves as technology gives innovators ever-increasing opportunities to simulate and
prototype their ideas. As the media for modeling radically change, so will the
organizations that use them.
With real-world examples and
engaging anecdotes, Schrage argues that the future of prototyping is the future of
innovation. A User's Guide included in the book helps readers quickly take away the
innovation practices profiled throughout. A landmark book by one of the most perceptive
voices in the field of innovation. Serious Play will lay serious claim to the hearts and
minds of forward-looking business managers.
Michael Schkage is a research
associate at the MIT Media Lab, a Merrill Lynch Forum Innovation Fellow, and a columnist
for Fortune magazine.
244 pages